Adventures on Le Planet Sauvage and other moments of a year /decade gone by

George De Castro Day

With Mary Hawkins, Robin Kane, Nadine Dowell, Bill Monaghan, Benjamin Heim Shepard and Ken Schles.

Fave new podcast.

shesapunkpodcast 

Jimmy James Calvin Wilsey, RIP, member of the Avengers,
who wrote perhaps the greatest punk songs of all time.

Guitarmy by Stacy Lanyon

"View of the Protestant Burying Ground, Rome” by Thomas Cole, probably 1833-4, Olana State Historic Site, OL.1981.17"

Back in  NYC talking about Hong Kong. 

Arrest at the Supreme Court in October. 

Murderers row.

Flowers of Evil.

Nan Goldin and this writer at the Met. Art News.  One of my favorite demos of the decade.

New books and joys.

“How are  things?”

“Savage” I tended  to reply  much of this decade,

mimicking an old college friend who  used to say the

same thing

when we lived in the Haight Ashbury in  the early 1990’s.

Since then things have only become more and less like this.

It’s been decades of it.

On Christmas eve, the teenager and I found

 ourselves watching the Fantastic planet/ le planet sauvage,

a 1973 film she saw in art class, tracing the trials 

and  travails  of the Oms, tiny human figures,

 and their giant blue-skinned nemeses,

the Draags, of the planet Ygam. For as long as anyone

can remember, the Oms have lived in servitude. 

Power dynamics shift after a young Draag educates an Om.

Rebellion ensues, breaking Draag control. 

With Utopian vs Dytopian outcomes at stake,

 the two groups duel over their collective futures. 

Sounds familiar.

In some ways the Draags and Oms are still at it.

We wanna wear those outfits said the teenager,

 referring to her punk band the Cannibal Girls and the 

cool blue coats the Draags wear.

In between a trip to Mom’s in Princeton

where my godfather and I discuss

 Jean Genet and drank too many bottles

 of champagne and a trip up to the Hudson

where we explore Olana, the former

 home to Frederic Edwin Church,

 luminary of the Hudson River School of landscape painting,

 I wondered about the decade gone by.

My brothers and I chatted about music and parents. 

John talked about Dad and his love for Fairytale of New York,

the old Pogues homage to New York

that I  played for Dad over  and over in the days before  he left.

Mom and I talked about her favorite book, Little Women.

She first read it when she was nine years old,

shortly after the second war.

“I loved the girls play-acting together,” gushed Mom,

reveling in the solidarity she saw in them, a fellow feeling

 that seemed to elude her in her life.

“I always thought I’d be like Joe,

but it turned out my life was more like Meg’s,”

Mom conceded,  looking  back at her life,

more like the sister who married the impoverished Latin

tutor than the novelist.

She didn’t feel like she had the glamour of Amy.

But at least she avoided the fate of Beth,

who died of scarlet fever.

I recall mom reading this book to us

some forty years ago. 

"Has anyone written anything about the family

dynamic with you and your brothers?"

wondered Dion on  Christmas,

my own Brother's Karamazov,

"perhaps the whole of that constellation is just a sort

of chemical molecule.  

 Is there a constellation of the lion and the sun..."

Dion, the little one and I walk  through the Princeton Museum,

Contemplating images of illness and health.

You wanna see my favorite painting here, I ask,

Walking everyone to the Home of the Heron,

George Inness'

  homage to a “correspondence” between this life

 and that, a material world  and a spiritual realm,

where the Heron sits in the woods, light shining on it 

from somewhere  else.

Walking, I wonder about what happened

over the last year, much less, the last decade.

Was it a time for progress or regress?

You never know what is moving below the surface.

Over these last few years,

I saw bodies in  the streets like  I’ve never  seen,

screaming  against the night.

Women’s marches and anti-fascist brigades.

It might very well be s time when democracy crumbled

as the executive branch stacked the courts the congress

 failed to check its power.

 I’m never one for premature autopsies.

And  we’re still fighting.

But the last decade from Obama to Trump, from offense

to defense gave me pause.

Observers of the Andrew Johnson era reconstruction may

 well have felt the  same way after their transformational leader

Lincoln was  taken out, replaced with someone not unlike

our current leader.

 We didn’t learn the lessons then.

We’re living with the backlash now.

Looking back on the year, much less the decade,

 I think of the actions and luminaries. 

The heroes who came.

And those who disappeared.

We lost Andrew Velez, the greatest organizer I know.

A man who attended thirty years of Monday ACT UP

meetings, later.

None of us are the same without him. 

And Jimmy James Calvin Wilsey, of the Avengers,

who wrote perhaps the greatest punk song of all time.

And Lorna Doom, of  the Germs. 

And there was Aurilla, killed on her bike,

Whose riding was like poetry in motion.

And Harold whose anxiety of influence lingered,

tracing "the  hidden roads that  go from poem to poem."

Venus who punched a cop, fighting for trans rights and freedoms,

and Kitty, both children of  Occupy, gone way too early.

Each life reminds me, activism is an ongoing narrative.

It is not a paradise lost.

Between poems and people,

Criminals and heroes,

Create something, they remind me.

Create something better of this world.

I was not part of as much as some.

Lisa  and LAK and VOCAL probably showed up more.

Rev Billy and Savitri and the Choir were there.

Public spaces rising and falling.

I never made it standing Rock

But I didmake it to the first Day of Occupy down

in Bowling Greene and as many actions as  I could

 get to between unions meetings and classes,

bringing up teenagers, taking care of an aging mom,

being a dad and a husband and a student of rebel friendships.

 Mostly they inspired. But sometimes they broke my heart.

Friendship breakups are the saddest thing of all,

 confessed Alice Bag in  my favoritepodcast,  She’s a Punk.  

I think she is right.

The decade began with public space battles over

the community gardens and critical mass.

2010

- we spent the summer working to Save the Gardens.

2011 - we organized 

2011 - we organized the

 shut down before the melt down ride up to Indian Point 

and then Occupy popped up. 

up. We loved it. Mourned it and celebrated it.

2012 - witnessed Mayday actions reminding us

 that all of our grievances are  connected.

Occupy Sandy built on the networks that were.

2013  - the next summer, my favorite group,

 Times Up crumbled.

Occupy the Pipeline fought fracking.

A Public Space Party grew out of the old.

Black Lives Matter was born out of Occupy.

2014 - much of the decade involved

a fight for  a livable planet,

with a People’s Climate March,

Flooding Wall Street. 

2015 - Cop21 in Paris, fighting for  a livable planet.

2016 - witnessed chaos and fighting,

misinformation  and Russian  interference in our election.

We bickered  and lost.

2017 - resistance grew. Trump’s inauguration

was overshadowed by the Women’s March

And campaigns to save the  ACA

Battling train bombs, fascists, and fracked gas  plants.

Meanwhile, Trump’s wrecking  ball destroyed

as much as it could.

Taking out the Paris Climate agreement,

DACA, and many of the step forward during the Obama years.

2018 - fighting  the tax cuts and Kavanaugh,

with multiple arrests.

PAIN Sackler zaps the Met and Guggenheim.

2019 - saw impeachment Rallies

and struggles to save democracy. 

Fighting the Williams Pipeline.

Supporting generic PREP with ACT UP.

Extinction Rebellion kicking off in  NYC.

Mourning cyclists lost in  the streets.

Losing and winning.

Arrest after arrest  as decade ended.

With battles over the Supreme Court.

Extinction Rebellions growing.

Revolting Lesbians raging and zapping.

Speak outs every week.

Reclaiming Pride in June.

Shutting down a fracked gas plant in Cricket Valley.

Trips to see a whale

 in New Bedford, a witch in  Salem,  a city in Bucharest,

a heatwave in New Orleans, a rascal Washington,  DC,

Rhode Island and Long Island, a Butterfly protest in Prague, 

off toTokyo, Hanoi,  and Cambodia,

and Honk Kong where the streets roared with Solidarity.

And San  Francisco where

  books were howling  at  the end of the world  literary salon.

Climate Strikes on Wall Street.

Subway fare protests in Brooklyn.

And civil disobedience at  the  Supreme Court.

All of us hoping to create something livable of

our lives and communities of resistance. 

In the chaos of

 the present, I read as much as I could, finishing Capital 

with my friends at the Commons, Moby Dick, Nightwood 

and Jean Genet with the Activist Informed Reading Group.

A clerk at City Lights said to read Baudelaire and

I  followed to my great joy.

The Flowers of Evil lull and tease.

Catherine and Erik and I read Master and Margarita.

And Harold Norse 

charmed me on the beach with his stories of

Auden and Allen and Tennessee,

 memoirs from the dead.

We read the Bridge out loud, thinking 

 about sailors cruising along the waterfront.

And wondered about the future, as words

soothed and brought advice from the past. 

The past was with us, meandering

through an ever-flowing present.

The Velvet Revolution turning thirty and on the occasion

 of my fiftieth year in November,

The activists of Tiananmen who did not

survive that June should have kids and grandkids.

Yet I was lucky enough to live, to write, to have a life.

Ten more books, two this year alone.

Narrating practice with the youth who called BS.

Illuminations on Market Street.

Old stories going so new stories can come.

Mysteries here,

Recalling  Sylvie and a note on  the street.

Saying goodbye to Luke Perry.

And looking to new adventures.

Have we moved ahead?

No  one can say.

Progress moves in odd directions.

Among people.

American nutzos off the rains. 

My frequent arrest buddy Ken Schles writes:

 “The past follows me like the moon in the sky. I can’t escape

 its hollow dead eyes or its beautifully cold distant light.

The past is at once frightful and haunting, comforting

and familiar, filled with accomplishments, memories,

loss and reminders of every possibility.

The past is elusive, untouchable, deceitful.

It grows bigger and bigger as it recedes into an

expanding irretrievable darkness. But let me tell

you a secret: We are conjoined escaped prisoners

 from those collapsing times. To sink

 back into the lifeless comfort of any accomplishment

would a betrayal of the present and to

 possibilities for the future. The past and future

are, perhaps, counterintuitively, two sides of the

same knife that intersect at a razor point in the present.

 The trick, I gather, is to balance that knife on its

 deceptively thin sharp edge without drawing too

 much blood...The past and the future are

deceitful, illusory Sirens. They whisper warnings

 and dreams into our ears. But they are not

 deterministic. They don’t predict our fate. 

To everyone reading this I say: The future

is ours to invent together. The future beckons us,

 calls us, demands our participation, together.

Together I believe we can heal this broken world.

The present is where our possibilities start from,

 and the future is where we’re going: headlong,

 without brakes or seatbelts. And our guides?

They sit with hindsight in our past.

After listening to them long enough you know

you must turn away and head on blindly.

 Let us be neither overly optimistic nor defeatist

 as we move into a new decade.  To all of you

who share this crowded and confusing realm

with me, let us dream this life together.

I hope it’s a good dream, filled with

possibilities and hope. A place

where all good possibilities still can live.#topnine #topnine2019”

Thank you Ken.

"....let us dream this life together."

Thank you activists and  friends.

Can  we still be a city friends.

Can  democracy be  that space  where we all participate?

“We had the right to vote as American citizens,”

 noted Cokie R, before she shuffled off.

“We didn’t have to be granted it…”

Have we used it well?

Maybe?

Maybe not?

It’s a complicated notion.

I’m  tired of  the  electoral college.

Abolish the motherfucker.

If voting could do anything they

would make it illegal.

But what choice do we have?

We fight for it.

John Lewis fought for it.

He’s still here.

So is my favorite president Jimmy.

Reminding us there are better angels of our nature.

But today may be a time poets.

“Since ignorance is on  the increase,” Baudelaire

wrote in one of his many drafts to the preface

of the 1857 collection Flowers of Evil.

“[It] dares today for the third time to face the sun of stupidity”

God knows we all are.

Especially here at play and ideas where I 

wrote almost a thousand blogs over the

 last decade, tracing a story from my

dissertation to today's disembodied,

sometimes lyric dispatches from the front,

153 entries this year alone,

 a new record, sound and fury signifying...

“When its over I want to say:

All my life

I was a bridge married to  amazement. 

I was the bridegroom,

Taking the world into my arms.”

Thank you Mary Oliver, poet born in 1935.

Thank you.

Godspeed.

Moving into the next decade, I hope we

can all walk with a little of that wonder.